PHF Science is proud to announce our ALMA digital twin platform has won the Trailblazer in AI Innovation award at the Aotearoa AI Awards 2025.
The Trailblazer award recognises cutting-edge innovation in artificial intelligence, honouring individuals, start-ups or organisations that are pushing boundaries, creating novel AI technologies or pioneering new approaches.
“This recognition underscores the ingenuity of our science and engineering teams, and the partnerships that made ALMA possible,” says Ashley Bloomfield, PHF Science Chief Executive. “ALMA has the potential to transform how we anticipate and respond to complex health and environmental challenges.”
A population- level digital twin can integrate multiple national data sources to create dynamic, AI-driven replicas of real-world systems. This can enable decision-makers to test scenarios, forecast outcomes, and act faster, from public health to environmental monitoring and beyond.
Alvaro Orsi, Data Science Lead at PHF Science, explains: “By leveraging advanced AI models, our platform can forecast scenarios and potentially uncover causal relationships within the data. This offers a powerful decision support tool that can benefit New Zealand across a range of situations, and we are excited to explore the many different directions ongoing work in this area may take.”
Winning this national award is a milestone not just for PHF Science, but for Aotearoa New Zealand’s AI and science ecosystem, demonstrating how world-leading research has the potential to deliver practical, real-world impact.